BGV Up

 I was watching the VH1 Classic Albums episode about Aja --  there's a type of person who gravitates back to this episode like a swallow returning to Capistrano, reliably, again and again; I am that type -- and I was struck by Fagen speaking the words to "Black Cow" as the track plays -- that first verse used to hit me very, very hard, when I'd be prone on the floor of my Norwalk studio apartment listening to the album on tape, mining its depths, sober by court order and trying to put my life together. You were very high. You were high!  Fagen emphasizes the repetition, the way it changes the mood from descriptive to accusatory.  But this morning I realized an unvoiced assumption about this song, one that informed both my reading of it and the notions I took from it for my own lyric-writing, then in its infancy, or toddler-hood: I'd written a lot of lyrics by then, but I'm a slow learner. Fagen, as he breaks down the lyric, says it's about a married woman ...

Bobby Womack's The Poet -- one of the most perfect albums I know -- is pop music for grown-ups. As such, it feels quite distant from 2018; the cultural space of pop feels, to me, largely conceived of at present as a place of youthful concerns, even if the formerly young continue to reserve their right to be the ones parsing it for broader cultural meaning. (This dynamic strikes me as weird, to put my point as generously as I can.) But popular music, like God, is bigger than our need to restrict it; there is no theme too big for it, no space within which it does not belong. Womack, the author of several timeless pop, rock, and soul tunes (he co-wrote "It's All Over Now," a hit for the Rolli n g Sto n es; he wrote "Breezi n '," first recorded by Gabor Szabo i n '71 a n d do n e agai n by George Be n so n i n '76), had, his whole life, bee n writi n g pop music as if its fu nc tio n were to accompa n y grow n me n a n d wome n o n the...

Gary Numan's glory run was astonishing: eight albums, released during a frenzy of creativity between 1978 and 1984, all essential. The Tubeway Army ones, long prized by students of early punk, deserve their good reputation; they establish the persona Numan would return to for much (though not all) of his career. The next two, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon , are classics by any reasonable standard -- not just "Cars," but "This Wreckage," "I Die: You Die," "I Dream of Wires," "Engineers" -- a young artist had found his zone.  Famously, that zone felt like enemy territory to music critics. So radical was his brief presence on the pop charts that, for many, it has framed him forever. In fairness, his vocal style, instantly recognizable, makes it hard not to say: "Hey! It's the 'Cars' guy!" when you hear a Numan song you haven't heard before. But there was always more to him than that, and evidence is...

When I was a kid, I spent about half of every summer with my Dad, then a reluctant bachelor navigating the mid-seventies on a circuit that ran from central California through southern Oregon and on up to Portland. The company he kept often included fellow parents, whose houses often harbored kids older than me; the first thing I looked for if we paid a visit to a new house was the stereo, where I'd immediately station myself, leafing through the house's record collection. I wanted to understand how music functioned in the adult world; it seemed like a language worth learning. Over the course of a few years I learned which albums were standard in the contemporary collections of hip grown-ups -- Tapestry , Pretzel Logic , Goodbye Yellow Brick Road . I struggled to situate Elton John alongside the company he kept in these record racks; his pop songs felt like the stuff me & my friends dug -- AM radio pop -- but, in the words of a grown-up who once took it upon himself to par...

I stopped updating Last Plane to Jakarta  God knows how long ago, and don't actually have time to be writing at any length at all about music, and yet, here I am again, lying around in a hotel room thinking about the music I'm listening to and wanting to organize those thoughts into something almost substantial. And so, to the list of other Blogger sites I've started and abandoned over the years, I now add BGV Up, in which I'll either: A) write about whatever record I'm listening to when the urge strikes to say something , now , or B) do that exactly once and then forget I ever had the idea in the first place These are the options! It remains to be seen which of them fate will favor!